The Book of Stanley

by Todd Babiak

  Tanya bowed, and backed away, stage right, with a flourish.

  No one came. A few people in the audience laughed.

  “May I present Stanley Moss. Stanley Moss, everyone.”

  Again, nothing. A teenager near the front called out, “This is gay!” Tanya ran across the stage in her high-heeled shoes and disappeared.

  “Uh-oh,” said Kal.

  Maha could not write fast enough. Sarcastic applause and smartass comments abounded. Someone booed. A few people stood up and gathered their belongings. One of the cameramen behind her began fumbling with his equipment and said, to one of his colleagues, “God damn it. I hate the Trans-Canada at night.”

  “Let’s get drunk and stay,” said his colleague.

  “Could do, could do,” said the cameraman.

  Then new footsteps echoed through the auditorium and the audience went silent. The Lord walked out alone, in his grey suit, and lifted his hand. Maha wondered if others would understand him in the way she did, the special glow of his presence. But she need not have wondered. No one in the audience said a word, and the cameraman went back to work. There was nothing to write but “silence.”

  He did not adjust the microphone or speak, for the first while. The Lord inhaled and released a breath she could feel in the last row of seats. “I tossed my speaking notes in the garbage,” he said. “I should say we worked hard on them. But I am here tonight with an invitation, not a lecture.”

  The Lord paused and said, “My name is Stanley Moss and I am an atheist. Was an atheist. Then, some time ago, on the morning of my first visit with a palliative care specialist, something happened to me.”

  Maha desperately wanted the Lord to surprise her, to say something about Allah or the Prophet. But he did not. Instead, he talked about his lifelong battle with doubt and the state of religion today, here and around the world.

  He asked questions of the audience. “Are you happy? Do you know who you are? How many hours of television do you watch in a week? Please count. Do you feel good? Do you cough in the night? Are you lonely? Are you active citizens? What do you think I mean by ‘citizen’? Does your water taste good? How much sleep do you get? Are you willing to sacrifice comforts for the broader good? Do you think religion is a positive force in society and politics? Do you talk to your god? To your children? Do you tell the truth?”

  The spell in the crowd was broken. Audience members began to shift in their seats, to grumble. One woman called out, “What is this?”

  Again the Lord lifted his hand, and again the crowd went silent. For some time, the Lord appeared either thoughtful or confused, as though he didn’t know what to say, or do, next. It was terribly uncomfortable for Maha, who wanted the Lord to be the Lord for them the way he was for her. Almost half the audience was standing, and prepared to leave, when the Lord asked the technician to turn on the house lights. Maha wondered if he was going to ask who suffered from cancer or AIDS or other terrible diseases, to dole out some cures, but he did not. Instead, the Lord said, “Belief. Authentic, honest, frightening, horrible, and heartbreaking belief. This is what is missing from our lives.” Then he pointed to a woman. This woman sat at the end of the first row, in a section designed for wheelchairs.

  Alok brought the woman and her chair up onstage. The Lord waited for her to be next to him in front of the audience. She was elderly, with a visible tremble. The Lord asked her name and she said, in a quiet voice, “Anita D’Ambrosio.”

  “Are you a believer?”

  “I’m a Catholic.”

  A few people laughed. The Lord looked up, briefly. “What does that honestly mean to you?”

  She shrugged. “I’m a Catholic. You know what that means.”

  “Do you have any unrealized dreams in your life, Mrs. D’Ambrosio?”

  The woman did not speak for some time. Then she smiled and said, with an embarrassed laugh, “To sing like Maria Callas.”

  This elicited some warm laughter in the audience. The Lord reached down and Anita D’Ambrosio took his hand. She stood up out of her wheelchair. They held eye contact and the Lord said something to her. Maha could not hear it, as he had not spoken into the microphone. Anita D’Ambrosio had the microphone.

  “Are you sure?” she said, shakily, to the Lord. “Are you really sure?”

  He nodded and released her hand, and she stood on her own, with a magnificent smile on her face. She prepared to address the audience and turned to the Lord again.

  “I’m bashful.”

  It appeared, from Maha’s seat, that the Lord and Anita D’Ambrosio communicated then, without speaking. She cleared her throat, curtsied to the crowd, adjusted her bulky floral dress, and began to sing.

  She was a soprano. Maha knew the song from Aida, one of only two operas she had seen. Though she was in the back row, Maha could tell that Anita D’Ambrosio was not afraid. Her hand was pressed to her chest and her back was arched, her eyes were closed. “O patria mia,” she sang, “mai più ti rivedrò!”

  The aria reached an impossibly high section, and as Anita D’Ambrosio held the note, she rose gently off the stage. She did not stop singing. Soon, she was several feet in the air, and her voice–as improbable as the fact that she was floating–was full and fearsomely beautiful.

  Maha fought an urge to close her eyes and simply listen. There were gasps and even a few screams in the audience. A man stood and pointed at Stanley and hollered furiously at him, but his voice was weak compared to Anita D’Ambrosio’s. Fifteen or twenty people struggled out of their seats and rows, and ran out of the auditorium. As they did, Anita D’Ambrosio dropped the microphone onto the stage with a crash and sang without it, her arms outstretched. She held the note for an impossibly long time. The three women next to Maha were in tears, and so was Kal.

  When Anita D’Ambrosio allowed the high note to fade, the song slowed and quieted, and she began easing back down to the stage.

  The eight hundred people in the Eric Harvie Theatre stood up. A number of them rushed the stage. Nothing was audible but shouts. There was too much to write in a notepad, and Maha could not see around her any longer. She climbed onto her chair with Kal’s help and watched Anita D’Ambrosio hug the Lord and kiss him and thank him just as a crowd of men and women arrived onstage.

  “Who are you?” Anita D’Ambrosio said, near enough to the fallen microphone that she could be heard over the applause and howls of joy, of fright, of something like anger.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Media outlets in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America called Tanya’s cellphone, eager to speak with or about Stanley Moss. She had sent a press release to a friend in Vancouver who worked for a global public relations firm, and the results had been instantaneous. In the release, Tanya had referred to Stanley as “the prophet of the next great world religion.”

  Most reporters were skeptical of the images that had spread across the globe, over television and the Internet. Experts analyzed the footage, looking for digital debris, strings, harnesses, and lip-synching errors.

  Though he had dismissed her advice completely and spoken off-message, Tanya respected what Stanley had done. She regretted the gap in her planning that had allowed Stanley to be mobbed onstage by religious nuts eager to touch him, and wished he had followed the script, if only loosely. But Tanya had to admit: the old woman was an inspired choice.

  In her own television interviews, after the miracle, Anita D’Ambrosio was politely amazed by her performance in the auditorium. She was also clearly an old woman with a voice ruined by time and cigarettes, an unlikely soprano.

  The Christian press wanted to know if Anita D’Ambrosio had been insulted by Stanley’s subtle denunciation of her religion. Did she think this had anything to do with the end of the world? Was Stanley Moss the man of sin, the Antichrist, the harbinger of the great apostasy? Had Satan the seducer been loosed from his prison?

  “I don’t believe so,” said Anita D’Ambrosio, back in her wheelchair. “He’s actually a very nice
man.”

  In Rome, the new pope dismissed the “Canadian miracle” as a bit of movie magic, yet another diversion from the truth. French media called Stanley a magician with philosophical and theological pretensions, and went through The Testament, point by point. Thierry Ardisson, host of Tout le monde en parle, phoned Tanya personally, asking her to bring Stanley Moss over the Atlantic immediately. Someone at CNN, in the middle of a thin biography, used the phrase “The Stan,” from the press release. Soon, the other cable news channels in Canada and the U.S. were doing the same.

  Since Tanya had the largest room in the Chalet Du Bois, the disciples gathered in her suite to watch the coverage on television and scan the newspapers. Stanley sat alone at the breakfast table near the window, staring outside. Next to Stanley, this cultural commodity she had stumbled onto, everything else Tanya had ever done seemed ridiculous to her. Leap was a sad little thing. Even her most extravagant dreams of a senior media job in New York, her own wildly successful company with a 10019 zip code, could not approach this. It was folly to believe one’s own press releases, but The Stan was all about belief. Belief made her better. Tanya believed.

  On the bed nearest Stanley, watching him, it occurred to her that a miracle-worker’s offspring might turn out quite spectacularly.

  “Maha,” she said, “you look uncomfortable.”

  “I do?” Maha looked down at herself, perched on a wooden chair in front of the television. “I don’t feel uncomfortable.”

  “Hop up on the bed, sweetheart. You can watch from here.” Tanya gave up her spot on the bed and sat next to Stanley. She rubbed his arm and spun her cellphone on the breakfast table. “Think you’re ready to tackle some of these interviews?”

  “Frieda warned me that all we’re really doing here is selling something. That’s exactly what I don’t want.”

  Tanya smiled. “Don’t think about it as something you’re selling. Your job, if we can call it that, is to communicate a religion called The Stan. A religion without dogma, without guilt.”

  “Without rewards.”

  “Now, don’t say that. We need rewards, or no one will join. We’re not saying The Stan will make them rich, or make their hair grow back, but it will improve them.”

  Stanley looked out the window again. “Doesn’t the idea of reward, of competing in the arena of rewards, just lead to abstractions and distortions and mental illness, in the end? Not to mention the justification of war and terror?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Tanya lifted the cellphone off the table and slipped it into her pocket. “Let’s you and I book some time for media coaching. This is a positive campaign.” CNN went to commercial, so Kal flipped through the channels until he found another newscast. The cellphone rang, now to the tune of “What’s The Buzz?” from the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, and Tanya answered it, “Gervais.” Alok, who had been asleep on the second bed, opened his eyes.

  It was the young BBC production assistant on the phone again, looking for directions from the airport. Tanya watched the television as she spoke. An Asian-Canadian psychiatrist and palliative care consultant appeared on the screen.

  “Hey, I know him,” said Stanley.

  Dr. Lam claimed to have discovered The Stan and attributed his powers to an extremely rare genetic malfunction that he could trace back to the world’s great prophets and spiritual leaders: Moses, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Bahá’u’lláh, the Dalai Lama.

  “Oh yes,” said Alok. “Yes and yes and once more, with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top, yes.”

  Stanley held his face in his hands.

  The cellphone rang again. It was Fox News, looking for Dr. Lam’s contact information. Then she talked to a reporter from The Guardian, in London. Was it true, the reporter wanted to know, that flights to Calgary and hotels in Banff were suddenly overbooked, heralding a worldwide pilgrimage to the home of, ahem, The Stan?

  Before Tanya could respond, there was a knock at the door. Kal hopped up to open it. Tanya asked the reporter to hold the line as a man in a navy-blue business suit that was too big for him walked into the room.

  “Kal, I said no media in the hotel room.” Tanya waved the man away. “You have my number. Call it.”

  The man stared at Stanley for a moment, swallowed, and said, “I am sorry but I must ask that you leave the Chalet Du Bois immediately.”

  “Why?” Tanya flipped her phone closed, hanging up on The Guardian. “Who are you?”

  “This room was booked, some time ago, by a tour group. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

  Tanya stood up. “Are you joking?”

  “I’m afraid not, ma’am.”

  “You can’t kick someone out for that reason. I have an arrangement with the front desk.”

  “I am the front desk, ma’am.”

  Stanley took a few steps forward and the clerk backed away. “Tell them the actual reason you’re here.”

  “It’s you. My manager, we, don’t want to be involved in this thing.”

  Alok slid off the bed, bent down, and punched the air, like a winning pitcher at the end of the World Series. “Only two days old and we’re already being persecuted. Pop the champagne, kids. We’re in the bigs.”

  “Shut up, Alok.” Tanya addressed the nervous man, who looked to be a virgin in his late thirties. He fidgeted with his watch. “Your manager made this decision?”

  “Me and my manager.”

  Tanya threw her phone on the bed. “I want your manager’s name. Now, you wimp.”

  The clerk was ready to cry, Tanya could see it. For a couple of years in the early 1990s, she’d watched boxing on television and had admired the way someone like Mike Tyson, at his prime, smelled blood and turned vicious.

  “I…please, just…”

  “Have you ever heard of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? You’re going down, amigo.”

  “Tanya,” said Stanley. “Leave him alone. We’ll find somewhere else to stay.”

  “No,” she said. The clerk wouldn’t make eye contact with her. He wore a wrinkled white shirt under his blue suit, and the top button was undone. There was a small gold cross on his necklace. “This is against the law. You can’t evict us from your hotel because we aren’t Christian.”

  “I’m Catholic,” said Kal.

  The clerk wouldn’t look up. Tanya wondered, for an instant, if Stanley had frozen him or mashed his brain into bean dip.

  “It’s all right, son,” said Stanley. “We understand why you’re doing this. It’s wrong, and you should reflect on that, but we understand.”

  “You have an hour.” The clerk turned away from Tanya, opened the door in a rush, and left the room. His heavy footsteps, as he ran down the hallway, were audible.

  Tanya shook her head, at Stanley and the rest of them. “What the fuck was that?”

  “No room at the inn,” said Alok. “Get it?”

  “I don’t get it. We can’t allow a turnip of a man to thwart us. I had him.”

  “Ah, we haven’t been thwarted,” said Alok. “This just helps us, ultimately.”

  “All my clothes are hung up. My toiletry kit, neatly unpacked. The computer desk is actually comfortable, a rare thing, and–”

  “Enough,” said Stanley. “Where’s the phone book?”

  It did not take long to find new accommodations, despite the reports of pilgrims filling the airplanes and highways toward Banff. Stanley opened the local Yellow Pages and seemed to know exactly who to call–the owner of a bed and breakfast on Grizzly Street. He booked all three guest rooms.

  “We might have to share a little bit,” he said, after he hung up.

  Kal put up his hand. “I, for one, would love to share. Can I join you guys?”

  Instinctively, Tanya opposed this move. She had learned, in the television business, that displays of weakness always turned fatal, career-wise. But there was great potential in sharing. Close quarters, an intimate B & B, opportunities to sip a glass of eau-de-vie
with Stanley Moss, in front of a crackling fire. Maybe there was even a bearskin rug.

  What would the son or daughter of a Moses, a Buddha, or a Bahá’u’lláh be like? Radiant, she figured, intelligent, famous, and hopelessly wealthy. And none of the sons and daughters of Moses, Buddha, and Bahá’u’lláh had a mother with twenty years of experience in marketing and development.

  Tanya felt fertile enough, and Stanley appeared virile despite his calendar age. If a man could throw boulders, jump off cliffs, dole out piano skills, and make old ladies sing then surely he could impregnate a thirty-eight-year-old woman with hardly any cellulite. She went to pack.

  FORTY-SIX

  Four large men dressed in bland cowboy garb leaned against the travel-booking counter in the lobby of the Chalet Du Bois, pretending to look at brochures. Stanley and Alok, the first to finish packing, sat on a chesterfield made of stained birch, with wolf-print cushions.

  “Have you sent flowers?” Alok said.

  Stanley had shared his feelings of incompleteness without Frieda, not to elicit sympathy or possible strategies to bring her back, but just to say it out loud. As Alok offered other suggestions and bits of “wisdom of the thrice-divorced,” Stanley watched the cowboys and listened to their thoughts. Each man had a natty beard and identical black workboots. They were connected in some way with the anxious and guilty clerk, and they were here to do something about Stanley and Alok. To take them somewhere. The cowboys were waiting for the right moment.

  “My wife after Kitty, Gabriela, collected little dolls. It was creepy in her basement, where they all sat on shelves. Anyway, when she was pissed at me I always knew just what to do. Buy her a creepy doll. The secret was to know the dolls she already owned and the–”

  Stanley placed his hand on Alok’s arm and squeezed. “Don’t fight back.”

  “What?”

  “It’s going to be all right.”

  “What’s going to be all right?”

  The clerk exchanged glances with the four cowboys and left the lobby through a door marked “Employees Only.” A moment later, the cowboys were upon Stanley and Alok. Instead of tossing them through a wall, Stanley allowed himself to be led forcibly through the lobby and out the back door.